The Letters of T. S. Eliot, Volume 1: 1898-1922 (18 page)

MS
Herbert T. Greene

[14 October 1914]

Junior Common Room,
Merton College, Oxford

Dear Bill

I presume you are now going through what I tried my hand at last year; teaching freshmen what they didn’t want to know and what I didn’t know myself. Since arriving here I have decided that I knew a number of things
which were not essential and was ignorant of a number of things which are. I wish now that I had taken a year – several years – here first and done my Harvard work later, instead of beginning my house at the roof. I have begun to entertain the highest respect for English methods of teaching in addition to the disapproval for our own which I had acquired through experience. I would give a great deal to have done the regular undergraduate course here. But I must make the best of it now. Oxford is a quiet and deserted place now, but, I expect, a better place to work in. At any rate, I find it exceedingly comfortable and delightful – and very ‘foreign’.

I wonder how you will like Cambridge [Mass.] after three years absence. I am enclosing a card, in case you care to call upon my cousin [Eleanor Hinkley], who knows your brother and knows you by reputation at least. The address is 1 Berkeley Place, Cambridge (I have no small envelopes by me, so enclose it loose.)

I hear Conrad’s book is out.
²
Remind him that he was to send me a copy, and tell him that he ought to write to me. E. D. Keith also.

I expect to be back in the summer. The war looks to keep up for a long time; if so we shall lose most even of the undergraduates whom we have.

I am glad that I chose Joachim, for I like him very much, and I imagine that he is the best philosopher here; though I think Prichard
³
is good. But I should hate to have to subsist
only
on the Oxford sort of philosophy.

Yours always
T. S. Eliot

1–William C. Greene (1890–1978), formerly a board member of the
Harvard Advocate
with TSE and Conrad Aiken. As a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College, Oxford, in 1912, he was the first American to win the Newdigate Prize. Later Professor of Greek and Latin at Harvard.

2–Conrad Aiken,
Earth Triumphant and Other Tales in Verse
(1914).

3–H. A. Prichard (1871–1947), Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford, 1898–1924; White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, 1928–37; intuitionist moral philosopher; author of
Kant’s Theory of Knowledge
(1909) and the influential essay ‘Does Moral Philosophy Rest on a Mistake?’ (1912).

TS
MIT

23 October 1914

Merton College, Oxford

Dear Wiener

I hear from an American here that you are back at Cambridge. If you should ever come up here (which I suppose not likely?) or if you are to be
about London during any of the vacations, I hope you will let me know. How are you getting on?

Sincerely,
T. S. Eliot

1–Norbert Wiener (1894–1964), founder of Cybernetics; Professor of Mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1932–9. He gained his Harvard PhD at eighteen and was now a Sheldon Fellow, 1914–15, studying at Cambridge with BR and the mathematician G. H. Hardy.

MS
MIT

Tuesday [9? November 1914]

Merton College, Oxford.

Dear Wiener,

I am glad to know that my letter reached you. I don’t know just what I shall do in vacation, but should like to get hold of you. I was planning to retire somewhere in the country with books; travelling sounds expensive and one can’t leave England anyway. Let me know what you are to do when you have decided.

I am doing my work under Joachim. I also have J. A. Smith,
¹
who I imagine is unknown outside of Oxford. Bradley is seldom up, and never teaches. I should like to have a chance to meet him.
²

You seem to be doing phil[osophy] rather than math[ematics].
³
I can’t imagine what on earth you are doing with McTaggart,4 unless you are reading Hegel or drinking whiskey.

Sincerely,
T. S. Eliot

1–J. A. Smith (1863–1939), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 1910–36; co-editor of the Oxford edition of Aristotle (12 vols, 1908–52); translator of De
Anima
.

2–F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), English Hegelian philosopher; Fellow of Merton College from 1870; and author of
Ethical Studies
(1876),
Appearance and Reality
(1893), and
Principles of Logic
(1922). TSE was never to meet him – Bradley had been suffering from poor health since 1871 and led a secluded life – but he went on to complete in 1916 his doctoral dissertation on him:
Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley
(1964). After his death, TSE called him ‘the last survivor of the academic race of metaphysicians’.

3–Wiener had addressed the Cambridge discussion group The Heretics on ‘Scepticism’, 31 Oct.

4–John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart (1866–1925), Hegelian philosopher; Lecturer in Moral Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1897–1923; author of
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic
(1896),
Some Dogmas on Religion
(1906), and
A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic
(1910).

MS
Professor David G. Williams

9 November [1914]

Merton College, Oxford

Dear Professor Woods,

I have promised to keep you
au
courant
, but I do not quite know what I have to offer. I am following these courses of lectures, Joachim’s on the
Ethics
, Collingwood’s
¹
(of Pembroke) on the
de
Anima
,
²
and J. A. Smith’s Logic. Joachim is reading the
Posterior
Analytics
with myself and one other man (who is likely to get a commission in the new army by Christmas, so that I may possibly have J. to myself); and besides I have an hour a week conference with Joachim and Smith’s ‘Informals’ which are quite informal indeed, as only one other man besides myself attends them. Smith’s Lectures are interesting as representing the purest strain of old fashioned Hegelianism to be found in England, I believe, and a type of philosophy with which I had never come into contact. The
de Anima
course consists in reading, explaining, and commenting upon the text. Collingwood is a young person, but very good, I think. We use the Teubner text. C. likes Rodier’s the best; better than Hicks. The course is to end with the term, and I fear that we shall not cover the whole of the three books. The other courses continue; and I see that Stewart is to have a course – a class, I mean – in the
Enneads
[of Plotinus].
³
I intend to go to this, and probably also to a course on the
Politics
[of Aristotle].

The course of Joachim’s on the
Ethics
is particularly good. J. is perhaps the best lecturer here. He sticks pretty closely to the text, explaining other portions of Aristotle – especially parts of the
Organon
, when relevant. I find the abundance of cross references very useful.

The
Posterior Analytics
I find very difficult. I accompany it with the commentary of Zabarella,
⁴
which is remarkably good, and very minute, so that this reading takes most of my time. If there is a copy in the British Museum (and Pacius
⁵
also) I shall make good use of it during the vacation. If the Harvard library possesses a copy I hope that you will let me know, as I should consider it great good luck. J. A. Smith also said that he owed his knowledge of Aristotle chiefly to Zabarella.

I do not think that anyone would come to Oxford to seek for anything very original or subtle in philosophy, but the scholarship is very fine, and the teaching of philosophy, especially the historical side of philosophy, as a part of the training and equipment of an
honnête homme
, has aroused my keen admiration. For anyone who is going to teach the Oxford discipline is admirable. It has impressed upon my mind the value of two things: the value of personal instruction in small classes and individually, and the value of careful study of original texts in the original tongue – in contrast to the synoptic course.

I do not know whether any of my notes would be of the slightest use to you, but if either my notes on the
Ethics
,
de An.
or
Post-Anal
. would interest you I should be very glad indeed to typewrite them off for you. – Or if there are any books you wish to be looked up second-hand – I am sorry that nothing on the
Metaphysics
or on the later Platonic dialogues is offered this year. I believe that J. has some good notes on ΖΗθ
⁶
but I do not like to ask to borrow them.

Very sincerely yours
Thomas S. Eliot

1–R. G. Collingwood (1889–1943), Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, 1936–41. His books
The Principles of Art
(1938) and
The New Leviathan
(1942) are in TSE’s library.

2–In his annotated copy of Aristotle,
De Anima
Libri III, ed. Guilelmus Biehl (Leipzig, 1911), TSE later wrote: ‘Used in 1914–15 with notes made during R. G. Collingwood’s
explication de texte
, and extracts from Pacius’ commentary on the De Anima which Joachim made me read’ (King’s).

3–E. R. Dodds, in his autobiography
Missing Persons
(1977), traced his love of Plotinus back to the classes given by J. A. Stewart, author of
Notes on the Nichomachean Ethics of Aristotle
(1892) and
Plato’s Doctrine of Ideas
(1909): ‘The membership of the class was initially six, but as Stewart proved to be an unexciting teacher it quickly dropped to two. I was one of the two; the other was a young American lately arrived from the Graduate School at Harvard … Like me he was seriously interested in mystical experience. But what astonished me as I came to know him better was the wide knowledge of contemporary European literature, poetry in particular, which he gradually revealed. Then one day he confessed shyly that he had written some poems himself’ (40).

4–Giacomo Zabarella (1533–89) published a commentary on Aristotle’s
Posterior Analytics
in 1582.

5–Giulio Pace’s edition of the
Organon
(1584).

6–
Metaphysics
VII–IX.

MS
Huntington

16 November [1914]

[Merton College]

Dear Conrad

I was very glad to hear from you after the summer interval. But why are you ‘slothful’? Are you satisfied to be in Cambridge at present? It would seem that there was nowhere else to go at present, unless you went to New York. I conclude that London is a pleasant place when the road to Paris is
gesperrt
[closed], and hope to pass several weeks there during the vacation.
University towns, my dear fellow, are the same all over the world; only they order these matters better in Oxford.
¹
For intellectual stimulus, you will find it not in Oxford nor in Urbana Indiana (or is it Illinois).
²
Only the most matter of fact people could write verse here, I assure you. But life is pleasant in its way, and perhaps I also am contented and slothful, eating heartily, smoking, and rowing violently upon the river in a four oar,
³
and performing my intellectual stint each day. Oxford even at this time is peaceful, always elegiac. It is Alexandrine verse, nuts and wine. What else? Oh yes, I have had to buy a larger collar. What else should I say about Oxford, or about the war? Let us take them for granted.

I think that you criticise my verse too leniently. It still seems to me strained and intellectual. I know the kind of verse I want, and I know that this isn’t it, and I know why. I shan’t do anything that will satisfy me (as some of my old stuff does satisfy me – whether it be good or not) for years, I feel it more and more. Not in the life I have been leading for several years. And I don’t know whether I want to. Why should one worry about that? I feel that such matters take care of themselves and have no dependence upon our planning –

I have secured your book. I regret to tell you that I have seen no advertisements of it in England,
have
they taken any steps about that? Of course, it’s a low time for poetry; but it would be an outrage if you did not get some good reviews in America. And they do take their time in reviewing verse, always. Could you not have it on sale at the Poetry Bookshop, at least? If you were over here it might be possible for you to give a reading there. You say nothing about your plans for next year, which I presume are affected by the war. Better wait till spring and see then –

Bien affectueusement
Th. Eliot